Trump approved a $14 billion TikTok deal in an executive order, and employees have big questions (www.businessinsider.com)

President Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed $14 billion sale of TikTok’s U.S. business to a yet-to-be-fully-named consortium that Trump said includes Oracle and Larry Ellison, with Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch also reportedly involved. The White House says Oracle will audit and help operate a “retrained” TikTok algorithm in the U.S., and U.S. user data will be segregated and stored under existing arrangements with Oracle’s US Data Security (USDS) team. The deal—prompted by a new divestment law and years of national‑security scrutiny—does not give the U.S. an equity stake (the government expects a facilitation fee), and still requires final Chinese sign-off. For the AI/ML community the move is significant because it formalizes U.S. control over TikTok’s recommendation stack and data pipeline, raising questions about model transfer, retraining quality, provenance of training data, and operational governance under new owners. Practical implications include whether a U.S.-retrained recommender can match current personalization quality, how global ad buys and TikTok Shop/e‑commerce integrations will be handled under split ownership, and whether engineering teams will be retained or reprioritized. The decision ends years of regulatory uncertainty but shifts the technical challenge to rebuilding, auditing, and governing a production-scale recommender system under new custodianship.